Analyzing the portrayal of child sexual abuse in La Presse: \nThe shifting dialectics of silence and denunciation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the discursive entanglements and juxtapositions around child sexual abuse victims, perpetrators and disclosure observable in the past ten years in La Presse’s coverage in Québec. Using a mixed methodology, I first examine the number of news stories published on this topic between 2001 and 2010, and subsequently use a critical discourse analysis to scrutinize over a hundred news stories that were printed over this span of time. In assessing this material, my questions concern whether the media portrayal of child sexual abuse might have helped, at a first level, to de-stigmatize the taboo surrounding this social phenomenon in the popular culture; and second, whether and how the press might be propagating false representations about the prevalence of child sexual abuse by dwelling on particular details and misrepresenting this issue. Further, I explore how social representations of child sexual violence are structured, both around victims and their aggressors, and the role of local mass media discourse in influencing a culture of denunciation regarding such abuse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".